Many insurers today are unable to align their life insurance sales processes with the expectations of modern-day consumers. The drastic digital disruption across the industry is largely responsible for their inability to maximize lead generation. Part of the challenge is that most prospective buyers spend time on digital spaces where affected agents are virtually non-existent.
The sales process for the industry looks a lot different now, with most traditional methods failing to match the digital experiences consumers expect. As an agent, it’s time to tone down the cold calls and start letting prospects come to you. An upgrade of your life insurance leads generation process is necessary for this. You’re selling a complex financial product that many prospects won’t commit to before completely understanding what they’re signing up for. With a proper life insurance marketing plan in place, you can easily adapt your agency for success in the broadly-sweeping digital transformation.
What Is Life Insurance Marketing?
Life insurance marketing is an integrated omnichannel outreach and communication process designed to efficiently generate leads and guide prospects, engaging them through every step of the buyer journey. It does more than just put your brand in front of the right faces across your online/offline platforms. The most effective techniques have evolved into intelligence-driven processes to approach each prospect with the correct messaging based on their real-life circumstances. It’s a highly-targeted and segmented method that helps address unique consumer needs and inquiries with multi-touch engagements through the various phases of the lead-to-sale cycle.
Life Insurance Marketing Challenges of 2022
Failure to adapt to the digital environment in the industry has a detrimental impact on the ability of insurers to get noticed. Consumers embraced the tech long ago and are increasingly using it to search for insurance information and make informed choices on what policies to buy and who to approach for a deal. Without an active online presence, it’s difficult to provide the omnichannel experiences necessary to maximize your reach, consumer engagements, and sales.
After setting up your digital platforms, you have to get both the message and timing for your strategy to work in a highly competitive environment. The inability to reach out and create awareness on products is the main obstacle to achieving this today. In a Deloitte study, it was found that only 9% of insurance buyers found their current insurance provider through an online inquiry. The glaring marketing deficiency leaves audiences without adequate knowledge or guidance to make informed purchase choices. This wouldn’t be such a big deal if it were a different product, but this is life insurance we’re talking about!
Gone are the days when the capacity to deliver bulk marketing emails was the sole business growth driver. This is no way to effectively compete with life insurance agents using the right tools and information to implement highly-targeted campaigns. Unfortunately, the lack of proper market insights hurts market segmentation efforts for many marketers. They’re unable to pick out key events impacting each prospect’s life, making it difficult to create relevant messaging and pitches.
The digital universe is expanding rapidly, placing more internet-enabled gadgets in the hands of consumers. For insurance agents, this means more digital customer touchpoints throughout the purchasing lifecycle. However, some providers aren’t set up to support the remote self-services and interactions that consumers demand today. This, too, hurts sales and business growth.
Life Insurance Marketing Strategy to Generate Consistent Quality Leads
To suit their digital lifestyles, modern-day consumers have specific preferences for the insurance buying process and interactions with agents. This is why you require a customer-centric marketing approach to succeed in your line of business. In fact, it’s a prerequisite for maximizing life insurance lead generation. Here are a few practical life insurance strategies that you can adopt to generate consistent quality leads:
#1. Focus on Educating, Not Selling
A salesy tone may work for certain products, but not life insurance. Such an effort will have a very low ROI if you try it on a prospective policyholder who has no clue what the policy you’re selling is about. The declining popularity of life insurance policies over the past decade attests to the danger of trying to sell before educating. In 2011, 63% of the population had a life insurance policy. The percentage dropped to 54% by 2020.
To increase your marketing ROI, you should prioritize creating awareness of the importance of coverage across all customer touchpoints. This is true for all demographics, including millennials who haven’t quite embraced life policies. About 58% of this segment forgoes life insurance for lack of clarity about the type of policy and amount of coverage they need.
#2. Trust in the Passive Marketing Approach
Passive marketing is one of the most effective, high-ROI marketing strategies for life insurance. It promotes your products in subtle ways, organically bringing customers to you. Long after you made the initial investment to create the right systems, consumers come to you naturally. It works because your brand positioning is a product of prior in-depth consumer research, letting you target audiences with incredible precision.
Anticipatory messaging is a critical component of this strategy. For life insurance agencies, this means anticipating key life events that can trigger purchases. Marriage, having kids, purchasing a home, and changes in financial circumstances are some of the most influential factors in life insurance purchase decisions.
You can then build your promotions around this information, closing the digital marketing gap that’s hurting the insurance industry. A few passive marketing techniques that you can implement include:
- Create a professional-looking insurance website that is SEO-optimized to drive more traffic
- Regularly post on your social media pages to build your online presence and gain more followers
- Reach out to prospects and educate them on your products and services via email marketing campaigns
#3. Make It Easier for Prospects to Find You
You need 100% visibility to be able to educate and positively influence purchase decisions in the life insurance business. Start by creating an omnichannel experience so that prospects can easily find you at any touchpoint or stage of the purchase lifecycle. Having an omnichannel presence means that you’re available on multiple platforms when prospects gain awareness of the need, look up product options, reach out with questions, and make a purchase. To accomplish this, try these strategies:
- Google search: Build a search-engine-optimized insurance website. Optimize the content around relevant search queries like “life insurance quotes.” This increases your chances of being found by users exploring options or looking for insurance providers.
- Paid ads: Run paid campaigns if you are new and don’t rank organically yet. These will help users learn about your new brand and bring them on board.
- Review sites: Create profiles on Google Business, Yelp, FB, and other sites and run campaigns to get positive reviews on these platforms. Be sure to display social proof on your site to make the most of positive feedback. All these efforts can help increase your visibility to prospects researching or comparing providers.
- Social media: Have a strong brand presence on social media and build engagement with your audience. Keep educating them and provide answers to personalized queries.
With these strategies in place, you can cost-effectively target anyone at any stage of their journey, everywhere they go.
#4. Always Be Available to Resolve Queries
A prospect will more likely progress down the sales funnel if you help them understand your life insurance policies. You should always be there to provide personalized responses to customer queries. Your omnichannel presence will be beneficial here. As you discover how to get life insurance leads more efficiently, you may try these proven strategies:
- Add FAQ pages on your insurance website
- Post on social media sites question-answer videos on key topics like life insurance beneficiaries or coverage options (by agents)
- Have smart chatbots on your site to answer straightforward questions and forward requests to live support
- Demonstrate thought leadership by answering questions on platforms like insurance-forums.com, insurance subreddit, or quora.com
- Offer personalized customer portals
- Invest in mobile apps for insurance account management
- Provide SMS text support
#5.Provide a Mobile-Friendly Experience
Mobile devices (tablets excluded) account for about 54% of internet traffic. Therefore, these gadgets are a critical component of the omnichannel experiences you should be providing. Make sure all your digital outlets are mobile-friendly to maximize your visibility. Users can switch devices at any stage of their buying journey, and this shouldn’t compromise the quality of their interactions. Here are some tips for creating a mobile-friendly platform for your life insurance agency:
- Make your website mobile responsive (this goes for all elements, including themes and templates)
- Eliminate pop-ups
- Shoot videos in a way that all important elements are clearly visible on smaller screens
- Create an app for your website for a streamlined experience and faster load time
- Design mobile-responsive email marketing materials, especially any HTML content
Life Insurance Marketing Works, But You Need to Do It the Right Way!
Yet to find any success in generating more leads for life insurance? Well, it’s not just you! The ongoing digital disruption in the industry has made things a lot more difficult for everyone. Nonetheless, at Stratosphere, we can show you how to quickly adapt your agency to these dynamics with a proper strategy. We are happy to help you close any vital marketing or digital gaps causing leaks in your pipeline. Contact our team of experienced team web developers, marketers, and content creators to learn more!
